We've gone from tolerating everything to tolerating nothing
Global loneliness epidemic: 24% of adults report feeling very or quite lonely; rates highest among young adults (27% ages 19-29) per Meta-Gallup survey across 142 countries. Technology enables constant contact but undermines intimacy; virtual relationships lack the distance and waiting that build genuine erotic bonds, replacing vulnerability with surveillance and anxiety.
- 24% of adults globally report feeling very or quite lonely (Meta-Gallup survey, 142 countries)
- Loneliness peaks at 27% among adults aged 19-29
- Alaleh Nejafian, Iranian psychologist born 1984, specializes in adult relationship counseling
- Dating apps, once promised as solutions, are now in decline
Iranian psychologist Alaleh Nejafian argues that modern relationships suffer from technological anxiety, capitalist consumption logic, and low tolerance for conflict, leaving 24% of adults globally feeling lonely despite constant digital connection.
One in four adults on the planet says they feel lonely. That's the finding from a Meta-Gallup survey that reached across 142 countries and asked 15-year-olds and older whether solitude had become their constant companion. Twenty-four percent said yes. Among young adults—those between 19 and 29—the number climbed to 27 percent. Only among people over 65 did loneliness dip below 20 percent, settling at 17 percent. These are not small margins. They describe a condition so widespread it has become the signature ailment of our moment.
Ataleh Nejafian, a psychologist born in Tehran in 1984 and now working in relationship counseling, has spent years listening to people describe this paradox: they are more connected than ever, yet more alone. She has written a book about it—Por amor, por qué pasamos de soportarlo todo a no soportar nada, which translates roughly as "For Love: Why We've Gone from Tolerating Everything to Tolerating Nothing." In conversation, she speaks with the precision of someone who has heard the same story repeated in a hundred different voices. People come to her therapy saying they want to be with someone. They say this even as they maintain the public fiction that solitude suits them fine, that they are thriving in their independence, that they need no one. But the therapy room tells a different story.
The problem, Nejafian argues, is not loneliness itself but the conditions that produce it—and those conditions are not accidental. Technology promised connection and delivered something closer to its opposite. Dating apps, which arrived with the promise of solving the problem of finding a partner, are now in decline. A match on a screen, it turns out, is not the same as a person. Building a real bond requires risk. It requires putting your body in the room with another body, exposing your actual self, not the curated version. It requires desire, which cannot be swiped into existence.
But there is something deeper at work than just the failures of technology. Capitalism, Nejafian suggests, has fundamentally altered how we experience love. We have been taught to treat relationships as consumable goods—to sample one, discard it without guilt or shame, and move on to the next, always under the assumption that something better waits around the corner. This is not empowerment. This is the logic of the market applied to the human heart. We have learned to choose and discard in the same breath, to calculate the cost of intimacy and walk away when the return seems insufficient. We have turned the other person into a product.
Meanwhile, the conditions of modern life make genuine connection nearly impossible. Economic precarity, stress, the relentless pace of work—these do not create space for another person. They create the opposite. We are too depleted, too anxious, too isolated in our apartments and our phones to build anything that lasts. The virtual world offers a kind of anesthetic. Someone is always available at the click of a button, always there to dampen the ache of loneliness. But this is not love. It is a substitute for love, and like all substitutes, it leaves you hungrier than before.
Nejafian observes that modern relationships have become intolerant of the very things that make them real. Conflict, difference, the friction of two separate people trying to build something together—these are now treated as failures rather than the inevitable texture of intimacy. People arrive at relationships expecting frictionless satisfaction, the way they expect it from a product. When difficulty appears, they leave. The result is a cycle of dissolution and disappointment, each ending reinforcing the belief that lasting love is impossible. What Nejafian sees in her practice is people who are desperate to be loved but unwilling to do the work of loving. They want to be chosen but put little of themselves into the choosing of another.
The solution, she suggests, is not to abandon the gains of recent decades—the freedom to choose, the rejection of suffocating mandates about how love must look. But we have swung too far in one direction. We have gone from tolerating everything to tolerating nothing. We have deconstructed the old frameworks without building new ones, and we are living in the chaos of that transition. Love, Nejafian insists, is not a productive enterprise. It comes with difference, with conflict, with the alterity of another person who will never be entirely knowable or controllable. It requires two people who care for each other and also for themselves, who can hold boundaries without abandoning the relationship, who understand that some pain is worth enduring and some is not. It is, in other words, the opposite of everything capitalism has taught us to want. The question now is whether we can learn to want it anyway.
Citações Notáveis
The majority of people in therapy declare that they want to be with someone, even as they maintain the fiction that they are thriving alone— Alaleh Nejafian
Capitalism has taught us to treat relationships as consumable goods—to sample one, discard it without guilt, and move to the next— Alaleh Nejafian
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
When you say people are more connected than ever but lonelier, what exactly do you mean by that gap?
The technology creates a kind of false presence. Someone is always available in the chat, always reachable. But availability at a distance is not the same as actual presence. You can talk to someone for hours through a screen and still feel completely alone because your body is not there, their body is not there. The vulnerability that builds real intimacy—that requires physical risk.
So the problem is that we've confused constant contact with actual intimacy?
Exactly. And worse, we've been taught by capitalism to treat relationships like products. You try one, it doesn't satisfy you perfectly, so you move to the next. There's no guilt, no pause. It's the logic of consumption applied to love.
But people have more freedom now than they did before. Isn't that a good thing?
Of course. The freedom to choose who you love, to leave a relationship that's harmful—that's essential. But we've swung to the opposite extreme. We've gone from tolerating everything to tolerating nothing. Any conflict, any difficulty, and people are gone. They expect love to be frictionless, like a product with a satisfaction guarantee.
What does a person actually need to do differently?
They need to slow down. They need to understand that love requires effort, but not the kind of effort that destroys you. It's the effort of staying present, of working through conflict instead of fleeing it. And they need to recognize that the other person is not a product to be consumed. They're another human being with their own needs and boundaries.
Is there hope in what you're seeing in your practice?
Yes. There's a moment when people start to question why they're always available on the chat but never actually meeting. That moment of questioning is where change begins. People are starting to realize that connection requires something technology cannot provide.